Saturday, June 23, 2012

Intentions:Too many people to whom I've shown Gil Scott-Heron's "The revolution will not be televised" did not understand many of the cultural references; so I updated certain aspects, keeping exact phrases as often as possible, with two exceptions in particular: 1) removing inapt racial specificity, 2) clarifying that the revolution will indeed show up on film--it will be televised...it will just be spun by the media monolith of the ruling elites.

Words:The revolution will not be televised (false)The revolution will be televised (true)The revolution will be accurately televised (false)The revolution will not be accurately televised (true)

The revolution will not be (accurately) televised

You will not see the truth, if you stay home.You will not see truth, if you plug in, turn on and cop out.You will not see truth, if you lose yourself with distraction,because the revolution will not be (accurately) televised.

The revolution will not be (accurately) televised.The revolution will not be brought to you by GE or Microsoft or Apple or Disney or BET.The revolution will compete for your attention against video of Obama dancing, shooting hoops and bonding with black youth, while behind the scenes he extends the PATRIOT ACT and facilitates the murder of countless Trayvon Martins around the world

The revolution will not be broadcast live fromthe Staples Center or Madison Square Garden or Hollywood,The revolution will not star Leonardo Di'Caprio,The Rock or Denzel WashingtonThe revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner.The revolution will not get you laid or paid.The revolution will not be (accurately) televised.

There will be video of pigs shooting down poor peopleto frighten you into docility and obedience.There will be video of Oprah Winfrey telling shaved,shiny, spoiled, over-protected women what they want to hear.There will be McDonalds commericals,showing men and women of various colors--everyone smiling, united by the happiness of serving you McDonald's food.

American Idol, NCIS, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, and Jersey Shorewill do all they can to distract--hoping people will continue to care which contestant is crowned biggest cultural distraction,but all thinking people will be united in the streets,looking for a brighter day.The revolution will not be (accurately) televised.

There will be misleading highlights on the eleven o'clocknews, mixed with videos of huge-breasted, shaved, shiny women faking fuck-me smiles, while they tell you about the weather that is right outside your door.But the anthem of the revolution will be the thunder of foot steps, the lightening of chanted solidarity--and a united call for further disillusion from a corrupt system.The revolution will not be (accurately) televised.

The revolution will not be (accurately) televised,will not be (accurately) televised,will not be (accurately) televised,will not be (accurately) televised,To see the truth, you will have to be there, live.

In the various Occupy movements that have spread across the globe, there has been much debate over means and ends which invite comparisons to European debates in the early 1870s regarding the role of revolutionary communes. Below, I reproduce excerpts from a recent position paper from members of Occupy Oakland which raises a number of issues, some of which would appear familiar to the Communards, others which deal with much more contemporary concerns.

In Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum, a group of Nigerians claim that they or their relatives have been the victims of torture, summary execution and other crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nigerian government with the active collaboration of the oil company. The suit was brought under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that allows aliens to sue in US courts for torts in violation of international law, under which dozens of cases have been brought since it came back to life in a 1980 decision of the court of appeal for the second circuit.

The same court has now ruled that the ATS applies only to individuals, as in the 1980 case, but not to corporations. The supreme court will have to decide whether it agrees with this rule, or with those of four other circuits, none of which have had any difficulty taking on corporate human rights cases under ATS.

Kiobel has attracted a great deal of interest in the legal community. Over 20 friend-of-the-court briefs have been filed on the side of the plaintiffs and almost that many on the other side. In the former camp are many human rights organizations, as well as the US government; in the latter, mostly multinational corporations and trade associations, as well as the governments of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The business people are saying there is no precedent for corporations being sued under international law, hence no international principle on which to base ATS claims. Not true, say the victims: IG Farben and other German companies were broken up or dissolved by the allies after the second world war for their use of slave labor and other crimes.

Sometimes the truth is buried in front of us. That is the case with more than 140,000 government documents relating to abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces during the "war on terror," brought to light by Freedom of Information Act litigation. As the lead author of the ACLU's report on these documents, Larry Siems is in a unique position to chronicle who did what, to whom and when. This book, written with the pace and intensity of a thriller, serves as a tragic reminder of what happens when commitments to law, common sense, and human dignity are cast aside, when it becomes difficult to discern the difference between two groups intent on perpetrating extreme violence on their fellow human beings.

Divided into three sections, The Torture Report presents a stunning array of eyewitness and first-person reports—by victims, perpetrators, dissenters, and investigators—of the CIA's White House-orchestrated interrogations in illegal, secret prisons around the world; the Pentagon's "special projects," in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; plots real and imagined, and much more.

European Commission Calls for Magnitsky’s Torturers to Be Brought to JusticeAt a mid­day Euro­pean Com­mis­sion brief­ing today, the spokesman for the Euro­pean Jus­tice Com­mis­sioner Cecilia Malm­strom made a strong state­ment call­ing upon the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion to bring to jus­tice the tor­tur­ers of late whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Mag­nit­sky and to stop his posthu­mous prosecution.

Disguise and denyby Tom MorrisNew Internationalist magazine, September 2000Anyone investigating reports of torture before the nineteenth century would have had a pretty easy time of it. That's because a good many religions and states practised torture as official policy, out in the open without any embarrassment.

The CIA and Abu Ghraib - 50 Years of Teaching and Training Torturersby James Hodge and Linda Cooper...When Americans found themselves looking at photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing naked and hooded Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison, it’s a safe bet that most didn’t realize they were looking at torture techniques refined by the Central Intelligence Agency over the last half century.

Torture is a modern threatby Duncan ForrestContrary to what one might expect, torture is still widespread in many countries across the world. What can we do to prevent it? One way might be to convince our governments to stop trade with nations which permit torture

From a Wikileaks investigative editor comes this plea for assistance in taking the treasures made public on Wikileaks and sharing them with the world. The editor complains, quite rightly, that few bloggers, scholars, or journalists are independently examining these materials. As one who has worked with Wikileaks materials, I am aware what a treasure trove they are. I also know that these leaked documents can be difficult to interpret with prior knowledge. Thus, I am still finding new information in the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures obtained from Wikileaks. But I have pursued other documents, only to find, myself, in some cases unsure in some case whether they were genuine and in others what to make of them. But I do concur with this comment that more independent journalists, scholars, and bloggers ought to avail themselves of these materials. And, in doing so we can contribute to the greater good.

Uncle Sam sings about the damage done to the planet by the unbridled capitalistic greed of its inhabitants. Chris Webbe describes this as a of "state of the world boogie". It's from his album CRAB (Country Rhythm And Blues). His website is www.chriswebbe.com.

The EU's foreign policy chief, Lady Ashton, is caught on camera panicking moments before she is to greet Serbia's newly inaugurated president, Tomislav Nikolic, because she doesn't know what he looks like. Ashton's envoy to the Balkans Robert Cooper, also in the clip, cannot help her out. The panicking diplomats are rescued by another official who brought a photograph

Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won't hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you're probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government's massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo.

But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime. ...

Having experienced the effects of being a whistleblower myself, I understand that the Australian Government is powerless even in domestic issues to protect its citizens. The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy sacked.

THE FOI IS DUE OUT SOON BY WIKILEAKS WRITER PHILIP DORLING.

you can email me at tim_byrnes@hotmail.com

AN AUSTRALIAN government worker was sacked four days into his job after his employer said he failed to disclose he had been given information suspected of being leaked from the United States Department of Homeland Security

ΠΟΥ ΠΑΣ ΠΑΙΔΙ ΜΟΥ (SON WHERE YOU GOING)"A ‘first -person cinema’ documentary in the Greek language. My work will focus on filmic aspects of personal history. I will come back recurrently through this documentary as a self referential artist trying to find his voice through time and culture on two continents, inducing moments of situationality in order to fit into a world where we are always making reference to a simulation of life. My aim is to enter the field of the social antagonist movement of contemporary Athens, Greece, through a self reflective gaze into my determining work, i.e. a centralized power figure within the U.K. axis of T.A.Z. (temporary autonomous zone). Moving through the paradigm of life construct, emotion purging and release, catharsis, Oedipal drive and breakdown, acts of purification, and adaptability. Beat by beat of a life which is an ethnographic inquiry, the material supporting the argument. Who am I as I engage in and observe myself in intense relational conversation produced and performed in cultural spaces? The ‘semiotic fiction-making’ in the attempt to re story myself into a single man's urge towards synthesis."

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Roots

Revelation 13

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy...

...And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?...

Mark 13

And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.